The More Some Try To Kill Wikileaks, The More It Spreads

from the ultimate-streisand-effect dept

One of the earlier events in Wikileaks' life that got the site a ton of attention was when a California court ordered the entire site blocked, after the site revealed a document that the Swiss Bank Julius Baer wanted to keep hidden. That story got a ton of attention -- in part because of how much more attention the document got after the court's ruling. In fact, that story was also a story that got the concept of the Streisand Effect into the popular mindset (and got me on All Things Considered chatting about the Streisand Effect and the Julius Baer situation). So it's been amusing seeing all of the attempts by US politicians to get Wikileaks blocked. As of this posting, the site has now listed over 500 mirror sites and the number keeps growing. And that's just mirrors of the site itself. The actual documents are being copied and offered up from a lot more places. Trying to shut down something like Wikileaks only gets it more attention...

I'm looking forward to Wikileaks making all the documents in this case available to everyone. I have no doubt Assange would approve. He's shown no doubt that private communications should be shared with everyone in the world.

Re: Re: Secrets for Assange?

No it is not. Did Assange suddenly become the head of a government? Make secret treaties? Had the ability to supress the information from newpapers? If the information is taken the state would control the release. Try to troll a little better than that.

Dude, you seem to misunderstand this, greatly. It's not about stopping the already leaked documents from further proliferation. Even bureaucrats under that already leaked is a past tense, water under the bridge situation. All the people who it would be bad to have that information had it in the first day, probably the first hour.
It's about preventing the next leak, or, in fact, just being plain punitive.

Re:

You can bet the NSA are trying their damnedest to figure that out. But this is what JA does best so I guess they won't find out.

Considering how people have been "rendered" from European cities by the CIA in the past, and given that the UK police claim to know where he is, I can only assume he's still free because either
- the UK and USA are not co-operating
- the USA know nothing good will come of him being "removed" from circulation. And I'm sure this relates to the contents of the "insurance" file.

So the plan is presumably to have him arrested for something unrelated to the actual leaks and hope he does not release the stinkbomb.

Calgary police said Monday they were compiling evidence for the Crown to determine whether to press charges against Tom Flanagan, a former adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, for comments he made suggesting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be assassinated.

The Calgary police join their Vancouver counterparts as the second department to act on public complaints against Flanagan, who now works as political science professor at the University of Calgary.

"Due to a number of calls we have received from the public regarding this matter, the Calgary Police Service will be compiling all facts and compiling a package that will be forwarded to the Crown prosecutor's office for review," said Supt. Kevan Stuart in a prepared statement. "The Crown's office will then determine if this is a criminal matter."

Flanagan, appearing on the CBC program Power & Politics last week, told host Evan Solomon that he thought Assange "should be assassinated, actually. I think (U.S. President Barack) Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something."

Flanagan retracted his statement two days later, apologizing for the "glib" comment and said it shouldn't have been taken seriously.

On Saturday, Vancouver lawyer Gail Davidson submitted a complaint to police in that city, asking them to review whether or not Flanagan was inciting murder with his comments.

Section 464 of the Criminal Code of Canada makes it a crime to "counsel another person to commit an indictable offence", regardless of whether the offence in question is committed.

Re: Re: Secrets for Assange?

Thank you Wikileaks!

Thanks to Wikileaks, I now know that us Canadians have an 'inherent inferiority complex' vis a vis americans that prevents our politicians from dicussing the state of american politics during our elections! And I thought we were just being polite! Well, I'm glad at least we don't have a superiority complex vis a vis the rest of the world eh...

How to kill WikiLeaks

Re: Re:

You also have the russian government, and chinese ??spying?? documents. Which I am guessing are going to be worse than the corporate influence and back dealing you see in the US documents.

One thing is for certain. The next year its going to be fun to watch as the news agencies all say how evil Asange, villify him, and then use all the information they would be to afraid to open up for public viewing to gain greater ratings.

Re: Re:

Otherwise known as 3.231700607131100730071487668867*10^616
-OR-
32,317,006,071,311,007,300,714,876,688,670
with 585 0's behind it

AES-256bit key, breaking a symmetric 256-bit key by brute force requires more computational power than you would believe. A device that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second would in theory require about 3*10^51 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space.